Music that has issues

I've done a few posts on the popular music of the late twentieth century (see here, here, and here), highlighting what I consider its obviously superior quality, imagination, and variety compared with most pop music today.  However, there are also some works from that time that have a disturbing edge today, however innocent they seemed at the time.  I don't mean the music was of bad quality (every era produces some bad music, which ends up just being forgotten); I mean that in hindsight it conveyed messages that were ugly or even threatening.

I'll start with a relatively mild example, "Don't You Want Me" by the Human League:


When this song came out, I listened to it a lot and it never occurred to me that there was anything disturbing about it.  Here's a reaction video by a present-day couple, which gets the point across well:

A guy who actually talked like this would come across as a dangerous psychopath -- a stalker type, as Asia observes (note that it's the woman who immediately gets what's wrong with this; to the man, it isn't so obvious until it's pointed out).  It doesn't help that the menacing male character is wearing so much make-up.  To me he gives off the vibe of the kind of guy who turns out to have a bunch of partly-dismembered corpses chained up in his basement.  Obviously that wasn't the intent when the video was made.  They must have been more than a little naïve.

Now here's something far more blatant:

I remember that even back then, when the song came out, I found it rather creepy.  But I knew people who didn't.  Again, imagine a man actually speaking these exact words, without the aesthetic intoxication provided by the music and melody.  You'd know that you were in the presence of a terrifying monster.  What on Earth was the reason for immortalizing and even glamorizing such bullying in a song?  Sting himself, over time, has come to acknowledge how sinister the song is, but says he didn't realize it at the time he composed it.

Some rather different issues come up with the song "Sex" by the band Berlin.  I am actually not going to embed it here, because the song is borderline pornographic and I don't want to risk my blog getting stuck behind one of those screens where you need to sign in to Blogspot in order to view it.  You can listen to the song here.  That link is just the music; there is an official video, but it's age-restricted on YouTube and so not watchable unless you have a login that works there.

The song is a duet between a man and a woman, most of it being fairly explicit evocations of sex -- "slip and slide in your wet delight" and suchlike.  There is also a series of choruses in which the man simply repeats "I'm a man" over and over, and the woman responds each time with a different male fantasy:  "I'm a geisha", "I'm your slave", "I'm a virgin", "I'm a boy" (wait, what?), "I'm your mother" (what?), and repeatedly and climactically "I'm a little girl" (no..... just no).  There's nothing morally wrong with fantasy and role-play between people who are actually consenting adults, but some of these examples are, to put it as charitably as possible, rather daring choices to showcase in a pop song.  There's also the implication that the man's role in sex is merely to be a man, while the woman's role is to act out and satisfy whatever fantasy he finds stimulating.  Nothing hints that she too might have fantasies or preferences that she would enjoy his cooperation in.  Or perhaps her fantasy is simply to be submissive.  This song is not as disturbing as the first two examples above, but today it sounds like something from a slightly creepy and off-kilter parallel universe.

Finally, I'd like to cite "Relax" by the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  The song itself is catchy and fun, with a few obvious sexual double-entendres; the (notorious) official video is ugly, brutal, pornographic, and ridiculous.  However, this modern reaction video is hilarious (again, linking rather than embedding for the same reason as before).  You can see the entire original video in the bottom left quarter of the screen as they're watching it.

It is said that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."  Culturally, even the 1980s are already becoming "the past".